The short answer: not in the way the phrase usually implies. Walking doesn't measurably raise your resting metabolic rate, its "afterburn" is small, and the muscle it maintains is worth only a few calories a day. What walking does is raise the total energy you spend across the day, and that is a real effect, just a different one.
Resting metabolism and muscle
Your resting metabolic rate is mostly set by your size and the mass of your organs. Muscle matters, but less than its reputation. Using the standard tissue estimates (Elia 1992, tested across adulthood by Wang and colleagues in 2010), skeletal muscle burns about 13 calories per kilogram per day at rest, and fat tissue about 4.5. So building 2 kg of muscle changes your resting burn by something in the range of 15 to 25 calories a day. That is real, and it is small. Walking does little to build muscle in the first place; for the comparison, see walking vs the gym.
The afterburn
Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, the extra energy you burn while recovering from exercise, depends far more on how hard you exercised than on how long. A review by Børsheim and Bahr found that it takes an intensity above roughly 50 to 60% of maximal oxygen uptake to produce a significant effect lasting several hours, and that the effect is minimal after low-intensity or short exercise. Most everyday walking sits at the low end of that range. A faster pace, an incline, or intervals raise it, but not to the level that makes it a reason to walk. See power walking and incline walking if you want to push the intensity.
Where walking does count: everyday activity
Researchers call the energy spent on everyday movement that isn't deliberate exercise NEAT, for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. In a 1999 study in Science (Levine and colleagues), 16 volunteers were overfed by 1,000 calories a day for eight weeks. Changes in NEAT accounted for about two-thirds of the rise in their total energy expenditure, and they predicted who resisted gaining fat: fat gain varied tenfold between people.
A 2005 follow-up compared 10 lean and 10 mildly obese adults and found that the obese group sat about 164 minutes a day longer. Had they moved like the lean group, the authors estimated they could have spent roughly 350 more calories a day. That is an estimate from a small study. Levine has also written that NEAT can differ by up to about 2,000 calories a day between people of similar size, which is a review estimate rather than a measurement in any one study.
The practical reading is that total movement across the day matters, and walking is one of the easiest ways to add it. Our pages on calories burned walking and walking desks go into how much.
After weight loss: what exercise does and doesn't fix
An earlier version of this page said walking meaningfully softens the metabolic slowdown that follows weight loss. We can't support that. The best-known dataset is the 2016 follow-up of 14 contestants from The Biggest Loser (Fothergill and colleagues), who lost an average of 58 kg and then regained about 41 kg over six years. Their resting metabolic rate was still 704 calories a day below baseline, which was about 500 calories lower than their body composition predicted, even though they had exercised heavily during the competition. In that sample, the heavy exercise did not prevent the slowdown.
That result is contested. A reanalysis by the same group in 2022 suggested the persistent drop was largest in the contestants whose physical activity increased the most, which makes it hard to read the original as either "exercise fails" or "exercise works." The sample was small and the weight loss extreme. For most people the honest summary is that a slowdown after weight loss is documented, its size and cause are debated, and we found no good evidence that walking specifically softens it. For what walking does help with after weight loss, see walking and weight maintenance.
What we'd take from this
If you want walking to move your daily energy use, the levers are boring: more minutes, a faster pace or an incline, and less sitting across the day. For how that connects to weight, see does walking help you lose weight.
Sources
- Wang Z, Ying Z, Bosy-Westphal A, et al. Specific metabolic rates of major organs and tissues across adulthood: evaluation by mechanistic model of resting energy expenditure. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2010;92(6):1369-1377 (citing Elia M, 1992). ajcn.nutrition.org
- Børsheim E, Bahr R. Effect of exercise intensity, duration and mode on post-exercise oxygen consumption. Sports Medicine. 2003;33(14):1037-1060. researchgate.net
- Levine JA, Eberhardt NL, Jensen MD. Role of nonexercise activity thermogenesis in resistance to fat gain in humans. Science. 1999;283(5399):212-214.
- Levine JA, Lanningham-Foster LM, McCrady SK, et al. Interindividual variation in posture allocation: possible role in human obesity. Science. 2005;307(5709):584-586. Semantic Scholar
- Levine JA. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis: the crouching tiger hidden dragon of societal weight gain. Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. 2006. ahajournals.org
- Fothergill E, Guo J, Howard L, et al. Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after "The Biggest Loser" competition. Obesity. 2016;24(8):1612-1619. wiley.com
- Hall KD. Energy compensation and metabolic adaptation: "The Biggest Loser" study reinterpreted. Obesity. 2022. wiley.com
Correction note: an earlier version of this page said walking meaningfully softens the metabolic slowdown that follows dieting and helps preserve muscle during weight loss. We could not support either claim, and the Biggest Loser data above point the other way, so both were removed. We checked the figures against published abstracts and summaries on October 2, 2026. We did not read the full text of the Levine 1999 paper or the Børsheim and Bahr review; the 2,000-calorie NEAT figure is Levine's own review estimate. This is general information, not medical advice.